The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Web-based collaborative annotation of high-value, deliverable product documents as part of a formal document review process saves time and money when compared to traditional face to face meetings or marked-up document exchange. Web-based collaborative annotation of deliverable product documents can also save time and money when compared to alternative review processes such as “Webex” style real-time collaboration, which requires all participants to work together at the same time.
When using Web-based collaborative annotation, the documents involved sometimes need to be exchanged over a wide area network, for example, the Internet, in one or more well known page-based document formats (instead of HTML) such as the Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF), the Microsoft PowerPoint® or Microsoft WORD® legacy or XML formats, and the Microsoft XML Paper Specification (XPS). This is particularly true with U.S. governmental entities such as the United States Air Force and the United States Navy which often require PDF documents. In In some cases deliverable documents will have a contractual requirement for formal draft review and comment disposition tracking. While presently existing, known web-based systems may support comment disposition tracking, such systems often are constrained by the normal limitations of a web architecture in handling large PDF or Microsoft OFFICE® (i.e., POWER POINT® or XPS type documents). Such limitations may include limited network bandwidth, web server memory limitations and web browser memory limitations on the size of the files that can be loaded.
Often the size of PDF, POWERPOINT® or XPS versions of deliverable product documents greatly exceeds the maximum size that a standard wide area network architecture can handle. In many instances there may be a need to transfer documents that may contain many thousands of pages.
A typical solution to the large document problem is to break the large document down into a plurality of smaller documents that each have more manageable size. However, estimating the ideal size and breaking the documents up is an ad hoc manual process. Moreover, the “ideal” size of the document is often difficult to determine with a distributed group of users connecting from different locations with different computer hardware via different networks and firewalls.